There’s a great deal of warmth both in and out of the kitchen in Netflix’s remarkably charming new food comedy Nonnas, a simple yet satisfying fact-based crowd-pleaser landing just in time for Mother’s Day across many countries in the world. It’ll make for an easy post-lunch choice for families gathering this weekend, providing the sort of mechanically proficient pleasures that used to be far more common back in the 80s or 90s. The platform has tried, and mostly failed, to resurrect the kind of endlessly played, easily rewatchable cable movie favourite and while this still might not be quite as fondly remembered in the decades to come, it’s a better simulation than most.
To those with less of an Italian component to their family, a nonna is a grandmother, the stereotype of which spends a great deal of time in the kitchen, preparing food with equal parts garlic and love. For Joe (Vince Vaughn, in reliable been-around-the-block mode), the death of both his nonna and then his mother has left him feeling unmoored, questioning what to do with himself and his life going forward. We’ve seen a great deal of stories based around sons and their fathers but it’s uncommon to explore what a mother means to a man in the same serious way, a strangely untapped relationship on screen. For Joe, the loss has led to a pervading chill and his unlikely solution is to use the money from her life insurance to open a restaurant in Staten Island.
